


Stationary

by voidknight



Series: Assorted Statements from the Archives, dated 2017-2018 [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Public Transportation, Season/Series 03, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Surreal, The Spiral, Trains, Unreliable Narrator, liminal spaces, the inherent anxiety of waiting for trains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25059121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidknight/pseuds/voidknight
Summary: Statement of Rebecca Bolsova, regarding an encounter on a late-night train service.
Series: Assorted Statements from the Archives, dated 2017-2018 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1812076
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Stationary

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this about a month ago and made some edits/updates recently! shoutout to my dad for reading this over and offering feedback

Statement of Rebecca Bolsova, regarding an encounter on a late-night train service from Petersfield, England. Original statement given September 28th, 2009. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

* * *

I live in Liphook, but everyday I commute an hour on the train to Portsmouth, where I teach painting and sculpture at a small private secondary school. Yes, it’s a long way, but honestly I love my job, and something like a tiresome commute is a small price to pay for the career of your dreams, isn’t it? I’m thinking of moving closer, but my current home is only a block from the train station, and you can’t get a better deal than that when it comes to transit. Besides, I like having a routine to stick to, and moving would be little more than a disruption. It’s nice to catch the same train every day, teach my students, and get back before suppertime.

So, ever since school started again, I’ve made a habit of going out for drinks every Friday night with two colleagues—Marie Monroe, who teaches English, and Daniel Carter, who teaches history. Really just one or two drinks, usually. We’ll sit in the pub and talk about life, offering advice and the like. I’m always out of there by 7—for train reasons, of course. I’ll admit, it wasn’t very fun to adjust my routine the first Friday we did this. But since then, I’ve become accustomed to the later train, and it hasn’t been much of an issue.

That is, until last Friday.

There were two reasons why I stayed at the pub until 9 at night, both of them fairly mundane. The first was that, when I originally left at 7 in a rush, I realized I’d dropped my wallet, and hurried back to the pub to collect it. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be seen, and half an hour passed until we finally found it, by which point I was in quite a state of distress. The second was that Marie had had a little too much to drink, and ended up in a puddle of tears, venting to us about her recent divorce. It was all fairly overwhelming—Marie’s emotional breakdown, the panic of losing my wallet, and, of course, the anxiety that creeps into you when you realize you’ll have to take a later train than you would have hoped.

So when I left at about 9:15, I was feeling rather distracted, and not exactly at the top of my game. But getting to the harbor and buying a ticket was no trouble. There were fewer people on the platform than I’m used to, which just served to solidify the differences between taking a train at this hour and the earlier one I knew so well. I pushed away the discomfort, boarded my train, and waited for it to begin its journey.

It was then that I did something a little stupid. I decided that it couldn’t hurt to take a tiny nap. After all, the last few hours had been emotionally exhausting, and I was itching to get home and go to bed. I set an alarm for the time about ten minutes before I knew the train would get to Liphook. That way, I had a reasonable buffer if I woke up a bit too late. And then, well, I laid back in my seat and just dozed off.

I think I had a dream, but I can’t remember what it was.

I woke up just as the train was pulling into a station, and another surge of panic rushed through me, instantly energizing me. I grabbed my bags and got off as quickly as I could, cursing myself for my rash actions. Nap? On a train, at an unfamiliar time? I would definitely not be repeating this mistake.

The train was starting to pull away when I realized that I was not in Liphook, but Petersfield—two stops early.

I’m sure I don’t need to describe the rage I felt. But there was something else there—a creeping sense of fear. I had, effectively, missed my train. The way I saw it, there were now two options ahead of me. The easiest, technically, was to get a cab—but a cab from Petersfield to Liphook would have been a little too expensive for me, and getting home slightly quicker didn’t register as much of a concern to me at the time. Besides, to tell the truth, I’ve never liked cabs. I know they’re perfectly safe, and I’ve taken many in the past, but there’s something about getting in a stranger’s car that’s never sat right with me, so I tend to forget they’re even an option. It’s silly, I know.

Instead, since it didn’t involve getting up and moving anywhere, I opted to simply wait for the next train—which appeared to be in only about half an hour, thank god. I knew that when Liphook Station finally greeted me, everything would feel right again. Like passing through that space would be like reaching the end of a long, dark tunnel.

So, I waited, even though that option had its own… unique trepidation associated with it. I’ve never taken a train from Petersfield before, and especially not at this time of night. Logically, I knew it would be no different than the trains I’m used to. But that routine was carved so deep into my memory that any departure from it felt… surreal, for lack of a better term.

22:37 was the time my train would arrive. I sat down on the metal bench and resolved to keep my eyes upon the little board announcing the departures. The board didn’t list any other trains; I was a bit surprised to see that mine seemed to be the last train of the night. At first, watching it was just a way to count the minutes as they passed with agonizing slowness, stretching towards the moment of my train’s arrival and my escape from this purgatory. I didn’t even think to entertain myself with my phone or anything else in my bag. But, gradually, as time wore on, I began to doubt myself. Did that train even go to Liphook? I checked for the third time, and yes, it did. What if the time was wrong somehow? No, it wasn’t. Why were the minutes passing so slowly? Was it just because I was waiting, trapped in a stasis, in a space whose only purpose was to shepherd passengers to new locations?

It is impossible to rest in a train station, because you are always awaiting a moment that you don’t want to miss. Everything revolves around a point in the future. From the moment you enter you are thinking about how and when you will leave.

Belatedly, I realized that I was the only one in the station—which I suppose had been apparent before, but the fact only worked itself into my conscious awareness as I started to stare around at my surroundings. The night was dark and silent; few cars sat in the station car park, and the entire time I think I only ever saw one person in the distance. In another situation, it might have been almost calm. It was cold, but not unpleasantly so, though my skin was still prickling in that strange way it does when you’ve just woken up from a too-short nap. My eyes flicked between the glowing orange letters of the announcement board and the train tracks that stretched off into the darkness.

Then, at some point, I looked back up, and the numbers on the board were different. My train, it said, would arrive at 22:52.

My anger had long since cooled, so what welled up inside of me at that sudden change was instead a kind of despair. That was 15 more minutes of waiting. 15 more minutes of lonely train station. I couldn’t tell you why, but my first thought upon seeing this new time was not that the train had been delayed or anything like that, but that it had actually read 22:52 this whole time, and I had simply been… perceiving it wrong.

Now, at this point I should mention that I’d drank almost nothing this evening, alcohol-wise at least. I had a small beer and that was it. I was not drunk, and I’ve never hallucinated before. But the fact of the matter is that the board changed its time estimate for my train seven more times while I was looking at it. No, not  _ while _ I was looking. I never caught it changing. I would blink, I would look away, and then my eyes would snap back to those illuminated numbers and they would be different. The new numbers sometimes represented earlier times than the first one had been, sometimes much later, always seemingly random. Nothing else about the board changed—just those numbers. Just my train.

I stared and stared at the board until my eyes began to water, until the neon made my head spin. I looked down at the ground, focusing on my shoes, anything close by—then back up again.

1:05. It couldn’t be right. It couldn’t have been delayed  _ that _ late. Maybe I  _ was _ drunk; maybe I’d passed out and this was all a fever dream, a nightmare that taunted me for the simmering anxiety I felt every day before catching the train.

A rush of air blew past my face. The familiar noise of wheels on railway tracks greeted my ears, harsh and sudden. I jumped up, heart beating much too fast as I ran closer to stare at the train that was careening towards me. It made no sign of stopping. I could only watch as it sped straight past the station. All of the lights inside were off. It must have been out of service, but to me it felt like a ghost train, an uncaring hunk of metal intent on its sole purpose.

And then it had passed, and the sound was already fading into the distance.

Were there people on that train? Conductors? If there were, I hadn’t seen them. It had come and gone so quickly that it felt like a hallucination. A dream sent to torment me.

Perhaps there were no more trains coming. Perhaps I was trapped here, in this place that no longer served any meaningful function, trapped in my own mind with its impermanent trains and shifting timetables.

I stood there at the very edge of the station, and I stared at the tracks for a long, long time.

The lamps, were they working right? They seemed to flicker slightly. My eyes certainly weren’t working right. I kept thinking I saw movement in the deepest of the night’s shadows, wriggling things that never resolved themselves into anything more than ephemeral, unknowable shapes. I strained my ears for the faintest sign of a whistle, for a grinding of wheels or even just a single footstep, but there was nothing but dead air and static.

Time no longer felt like a constant, but eventually I stepped back and looked up at the orange lights of the announcement board. A cold, sharp terror ran through me as I registered the new train time, which was not a number at all. It read, “NOW.”

At that moment I realized that there was somebody standing on the train tracks.

I couldn’t tell how long they’d been there. They certainly hadn’t made a sound as they approached. But there they were on the level crossing, a couple meters out from the end of the station, not quite close enough to be caught in the lamplight. As I watched, they began to move towards me across the train tracks with a leisurely, inexorable slowness. They were tall, and wore an outfit reminiscent of a train conductor’s—a shirt and tie, a long coat, and that signature cap. There was something off about it, though I couldn’t say what. It felt like a costume, not a uniform. Like they were an excited, train-obsessed kid playing dress-up. Masses of curly hair spilled out from under their cap, and what I remember thinking was whether or not that was allowed. Surely some sort of regulation required their hair to be tied back. Not… left  _ sprawling, _ like this.

I glanced back up at the board. The numbers for my train time were gone, replaced by a scrolling mass of gibberish.

“Where’s my train?” I yelled at the figure.

“It’s here,” they said.

And then it was here. I have no memory of it arriving, but it was there, and it was  _ my _ train, but it wasn’t the train I had been expecting. It was too long. Or perhaps it might have been too short. It had no whistle, but the sound reverberated through my mind like a siren’s song. It had a color, too, I think. I couldn’t quite tell if its wheels touched the tracks, or where its wheels were located, or where the tracks were located. I kept wondering how I was supposed to get to my destination if the tracks were curled around themselves in a tight spiral.

I went inside, somehow, and there they were—the conductor, with their too-long hair and their crisp, colorful suit. I kept getting lost in the pattern of the threads, how the fabric was woven together. After some time, I dragged my gaze up towards their face, and discovered that they were smiling, and that the tilt of their cap hid their eyes.

I looked at the front of the train and stared into the headlights and it felt like I was making eye contact.

The conductor asked me for a ticket, and when I gave them mine, it wasn’t a ticket at all, at least until it squirmed out of my grasp and dove into a hole in the floor. They asked me where I was going, and I gave them a name of a town. I’m not sure if it was a name of a  _ real _ town, but Liphook is a real town, I think. Their smile widened and they said that a name wasn’t what they were after. Does a place need a name? Does  _ anything _ need a name?

I asked if we were in a place, and if it had a name. They asked me if a train was a  _ place. _ If a train station was a place. I said no, that a train station was just a bridge between the  _ real _ places. And they nodded, like that made a lot of sense.

I sat down on the carpet. It was thick and black and decorated with a dizzying pattern of squiggles and lines and spirals, like the carpet of a bowling alley. I couldn’t see the ceiling, but it was also carpeted. There was a map on the wall, but looking at it made my head hurt. There were adverts near the back of the car. “Sleep is for the weak,” one said, and the woman in the photo seemed to be smiling much too wide. I don’t remember the others. I don’t think they were in English. I don’t think they were in any language at all.

We started moving, which didn’t make sense, because we’d been travelling the whole time. I didn’t see anything outside the window, and it was beautiful. The shapes and patterns and endless fractals that grew like trees across my vision were more wonderful than anything I could ever convey in a piece of art. I might have cried a little bit, and when my tears hit the carpet, more shapes blossomed upon it, writhing into being.

I asked the conductor where the train went, but I don’t remember what the answer was. Did they always travel to the same places? No, they didn’t, the conductor told me. They had no defined schedule, no structure—a prospect that both thrilled and deeply terrified me. So I asked if they’d gone anywhere interesting recently. Or if they had any such journeys coming up. They grinned at that, and told me that they were running a special service to a place called Sannikov Land, and that I could come along if I wanted. I very politely declined, as I didn’t want to skip out on my work. Besides, I was not in the habit of taking unfamiliar trains.

When we arrived, it wasn’t at Liphook, though it was a  _ real _ place, and that was good enough for me. I finally got some sleep, and all throughout my dreams, those fractals and spirals I had seen outside the window of the train danced in untraceable patterns. Maybe I’ll try to paint the scene one day. I’m sure my students would be fascinated.

I’ve taken the train to work and back every day since then, careful to stick close to my regular schedule. Whenever we stop at Petersfield, I always find myself looking out the window, but nothing unusual has happened. Except—except, yesterday, I think I saw someone in a conductor’s uniform with a long coat and curly hair standing on the low bridge above the tracks just before you pull into the station.

I suppose their offer still stands. I don’t  _ want _ to break routine. I don’t want to find myself on another impossible train. But maybe, deep down, there’s something about the thrill of it that excites me.

* * *

Statement ends.

Hmm. I can’t say I’m much surprised by this statement at all. A mysterious, curly-haired, semi-humanoid figure presiding over—and perhaps existing as part of—some sort of unreal liminal space. The Spiral does love to challenge the idea of a “location,” doesn’t it?

According to her colleagues—who Tim contacted, albeit begrudgingly—the first part of Ms. Bolsova’s statement is more or less accurate. As far as they can remember, she did leave their company around 9:15 PM, in a, quote, “confused and restless state.” From there on out nothing can be confirmed, especially since it seems she was the only one at Petersfield Station at the time of her encounter. What I do know is that early in the morning on Saturday, the 23rd of September, Rebecca Bolsova checked in at a hotel in Exeter, some 130 miles from Liphook.

Further digging reveals that Ms. Bolsova was fired from her position as an arts teacher at Griffin Academy, Portsmouth, about a month after giving this statement. I can’t find specific details, but a brief article mentions “graffiti,” “vandalism,” and “attempts to convert her students.” It doesn’t say to what sort of religion or… practice. She disappeared shortly afterwards. According to her colleague Daniel, he last heard from her on November 1st, when she apparently called him from a town in northern Russia. He distinctly remembers her describing the “exhilaration of letting go,” and mentioning a new job.

Whether Rebecca Bolsova—or her mysterious Conductor—survived the collapse of the Great Twisting is anyone’s guess. I will, however, keep an eye out for more statements about trains.

End recording.


End file.
